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Under Siege
by Keith Langlois
Forgive John Kuester if he sometimes feels like Butch Cassidy and the Pistons are his Sundance Kid. They’ve been irresistibly charming for much of this season, but they can only hold off the Bolivian Army so long with a couple of pistoleros and a box of bullets.
One-third of the season is now in the books and the Pistons have played exactly one game – the season opener at Memphis, a 22-point win – with a full cast. Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince have missed 24 games apiece, Ben Gordon nine, Will Bynum three and Charlie Villanueva one for a total of 61 man-games lost to injury alone.
Beyond that, Gordon was clearly ailing for the three games he played after skipping two games following the sprained ankle he suffered in the Nov. 25 meeting with Cleveland, Bynum was well below par on a sprained right ankle before a sprained left ankle sidelined him for those three games earlier this month, Villanueva is now dealing with plantar fasciitis, and Rodney Stuckey – the rare iron man who’s appeared in all 27 games – is battling through a variety of aches and pains that have resulted from overuse as those around him have fallen.
“I just want health,” Will Bynum said Monday when somebody asked him what he wanted for Christmas. “If I’m healthy, I’m fine.”
If ever there was a time to get healthy – or at least to get one of Hamilton or Gordon back, to ease the scoring burden on Stuckey – now is it.
The next five games represent a critical stretch of the schedule, all of them against the teams bunched around the Pistons in the Eastern Conference standings. The Pistons go into Monday’s games seeded No. 8 in the East and the next five games are against the nos. 7, 9, 10 and 11 seeds with two meetings with Toronto (7) and one each with Chicago (9), Charlotte (10) and New York (11).
“Each game is important, especially these games where we’re all in that bubble, in that mix,” Villanueva said. “All these are winnable games, but we have to learn to win on the road. That’s going to be very important.”
Charlotte got some bounce from the trade that shipped Raja Bell and Vlad Radmanovic to Golden State in exchange for Stephen Jackson, but the Bobcats have lost three straight and are gauging the fallout from a public spat between Gerald Wallace and two starters he called out for lack of heart after Saturday’s loss to Utah, Tyson Chandler and Boris Diaw.
Toronto, which then visits The Palace on Wednesday, has won two in a row and six of its last 10, though the Raptors have benefitted from a soft schedule and remains a very spotty team defensively.
After that Tuesday-Wednesday back to back, the Pistons will have three full days off before a return trip to Toronto on Sunday. Maybe somewhere in those three days, the Pistons will get their batteries recharged and welcome one or more of their injured players to the fold.
“I think that break will help us,” Kuester said. “We’re looking forward to it. We’ve got a great challenge in going to Charlotte tonight and then we play a back to back. We’ve got to somehow, some way play with the energy I know we’re capable of and then we’ll be fine.”
The good news is that both Gordon and Hamilton practiced Monday; the bad news is that it really wasn’t much of a practice, not enough to test their viability for a return, with the team in the midst of playing six games in nine days with a short roster.
Bynum again tweaked his right ankle in Sunday’s loss to Los Angeles and Villanueva’s sore heel bothers him more some games than others. He did discard the mask he’s worn to protect the nose he broke in the Nov. 29 win over Atlanta on Sunday, though he wasn’t given official permission from the medical staff to do so.
“I’m done with the mask,” he said. “I graduated from the mask. I’m done with it. It was bothering me a lot yesterday. My feet, the facemask – I had to get rid of one thing, so the mask had to go.”
Villanueva has his family set to join him here for the holidays from New York, as will Kuester’s from Philadelphia. Jonas Jerebko’s parents and sister are here from Sweden and several other players will have family trickling into town over the next few days. It’s enough of a break from routine to raise red flags for a coach.
“You’re always concerned about certain times of the year – this is one of them,” Kuester said. “You’re getting close to the holidays. It is a special time. You want the guys being focused on what needs to be done, and yet when it is over, I want them to enjoy their holidays.
“These guys have been great. I’m not going to lie to you – I was disappointed yesterday, in the sense that I know what we’re capable of doing and we’ve done it against quality teams already. This group has given me everything they’ve had for the most part and when the holidays do come, I want them to enjoy themselves.”
But what he really wants is to put a stop to the four-game losing streak that comes on the heels of a five-game win streak. As disappointing as the losing skid has been, dropping the Pistons to 11-16 after they’d crept within a game of .500, it really wasn’t a surprise that the Pistons struggled to eke out a win in road games at Houston, New Orleans and Oklahoma City followed by a welcome-home Palace meeting with the defending NBA champion Lakers.
But now comes a stretch of critical games against teams with their own issues. When the Pistons lost seven straight in November, four of them on a brutal Western road swing, Kuester changed the starting lineup, inserting Jason Maxiell for Villanueva and bringing Chucky Atkins off the bench. Has he considered another switch?
Sounds like maybe, but not immediately.
“We’ll just sort of sit on that right now,” he said. “I don’t want to give you a definitive answer because you never know who’s going to be healthy. We made a change (before) and probably will not make a change for the Charlotte game. Just don’t know.”
